I have a Tivo HD with a 1TB drive. I have had it for years and just started running into problems with it being slow and Netflix bugging out on it sometimes. So this morning I initiated a kickstart 57 before I left for work. I get home and it is stuck in the infinite Green screen loop. I have been searching and found this is most likely caused by the Swap partition not being large enough for a 1TB drive.

Does anyone know if it is possible to increase the partition size of the swap partition without losing any of my recordings? Or of another way I can break this infinite loop?

I am tempted to try backing up the drive with winmfs, then restoring it but this time increasing the swap partition size. Do you guys think that will work?

I have a Tivo HD with a 1TB drive. I have had it for years and just started running into problems with it being slow and Netflix bugging out on it sometimes. So this morning I initiated a kickstart 57 before I left for work. I get home and it is stuck in the infinite Green screen loop. I have been searching and found this is most likely caused by the Swap partition not being large enough for a 1TB drive.

Does anyone know if it is possible to increase the partition size of the swap partition without losing any of my recordings? Or of another way I can break this infinite loop?

I am tempted to try backing up the drive with winmfs, then restoring it but this time increasing the swap partition size. Do you guys think that will work?

Although I, perhaps unnecessarily, adhere to the one MB of swap for every 2GB of drive rule, up to 1GB of swap on a 2TB drive, I suspect that's not your problem.

When any model of S2 or S3 gives trouble, odds are very good it's the power supply, and that needs to be eliminated as the cause before proceeding to other troubleshooting.

The next most likely culprit is the hard drive having physical problems.

You should pull it, hook it to a PC, and run the manufacturer's own diagnostic software long test instead of relying on KS 54.

Next most likely cause after power and physical drive problems is the software on the physically good drive has gotten scrambled somehow.

You could get a larger than 1TB drive--I'd recommend the 2TB WD20EURS--and use WinMFS to copy the 1TB to it while taking advantage of the feature that lets you specify swap partition size, and after several hours all of your shows should have been copied over as well as the operating system software and all of your settings, provided that if the problem is the 1TB drive it's not too screwed up.

Of course when you do the copy, the situation causing the green screen loop will still exist, so it'll have to work its way through that.

Unitron - thank you for your response. I know it is a long shot. I am hoping that by backing up then re-imaging the drive, and increasing the swap file size that my drive can finally go through the kickstart 57 that I initiated. This way I do not lose my recording. If successful, I am hoping I can transfer / backup the recordings. Test the drive then do a clean image from the original HD and transfer my recordings onto the new image. I know it is a lot of work and time. But I am always up for an adventure

I will also take your advice about the power supply. My first step before the backup / reimage process will be to image a drive with a clean image from the original. Throw it into the TV and see if it boots up and works ok

I will also take your advice about the power supply. My first step before the backup / reimage process will be to image a drive with a clean image from the original. Throw it into the TV and see if it boots up and works ok

FWIW you can only do a 2TB drive with 11.0.k or higher, the "original" image won't support it, just in case you were considering that option

__________________"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."

Dianebrat, thank you for the info. I have not looked up much on upgrading drives since I first did it 3 years ago to my tivo. I was just planning on grabbing another 1TB drive But thank you for your input

Well it looks like my original plan is a no go. I ran a WD Diagnostics on the drive and it passes, but I cannot get MFScopy to to run. It crashes when I click to run it. Either it doesn't like going from a 1Tb drive to another 1Tb drive or since I set the drive to run a kickstart 57 it is not reading it.

Well it looks like my original plan is a no go. I ran a WD Diagnostics on the drive and it passes, but I cannot get MFScopy to to run. It crashes when I click to run it. Either it doesn't like going from a 1Tb drive to another 1Tb drive or since I set the drive to run a kickstart 57 it is not reading it.

Is the deal that you need 11.0k for the TiVo to handle a 2TB drive regardless of how little of it is used, even if you use
hdparm
to get it to report a lower than reality LBA number, or is it that you need 11.0k to handle a partition larger than 1.2TB?

In the older OS's if you told WinMFS "yes use all the drive" on something bigger than 1.2TB they wouldn't boot, with 11.0.k and higher you can say "use all the drive" and it boots and works. You've always been able to use a larger drive and limit it to 1.2TB and have it work, I'd done so with a 1.5TB a few years ago.

I don't know which member stumbled on the change, but it was last summer when they reported the newer behavior.

__________________"There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out."

When I do an MSinfo on the drive it says it is not a tivo drive. I tried the fix swap and boot but MSinfo still says it isn't a tivo drive. Even though when I select the drive it says it is a Tivo Series 2 or 3 drive

Would I be able to increase the swap partion size with DDRescue? pretty much keep everything how it is now and expand that partion? Or use Gparted?

GParted, and anything based on it, is, I think, not designed to deal with the Apple Partition Map, and will probably see the drive as blank.

I suspect if you booted the PC with the MFS Live cd v1.4 (a copy of which you should burn for yourself just to have it around) and used the version of

mfsinfo

on that, that it would say "volume header corrupt".

But I don't know how to fix that.

(I suspect it involves hex editing)

You're going to have to decide just how much money, time, and effort you want to put into saving your recordings.

If you try to re-image the drive *and* increase the swap size, you're going to overwrite stuff like partition boundaries and that will make any info that survives about where the recordings are no longer correct.

dd_rescue

(which is on the MFS Live cd v1.4)

doesn't much know or care whether it's a TiVo drive or not, it just copies byte for byte.

So it's useful for "Xeroxing" a drive or a part of a drive.

You should probably get a second drive at least as big and "Xerox" the original and do all of your experimenting on the copy.

There might be a very complicated and convoluted and time-consuming way to save the shows that would probably require a third drive as well.

The 3rd posts says about swapping the spare software upgrade partion and using as the swap drive so I can boot and allow the kickstart 57 to do its work. After it is done I can undo the change and put the drive back into my tivo and see how it works Wish me luck.

Well that was a no go. I tried the commands listed but it wasn't seeing the partions. I did an MSFINO and it said something about corrupt partion table or invalid. That was on the spare drive so I am going to try it on the drive from the Tivo.

The 3rd posts says about swapping the spare software upgrade partion and using as the swap drive so I can boot and allow the kickstart 57 to do its work. After it is done I can undo the change and put the drive back into my tivo and see how it works Wish me luck.

Well, you'll certainly learn a lot doing it that way.

Be aware that post is from the days of the S1 and early S2s, and that they're talking about using MFS Tools, and not the successor MFS Live cd.

If you had a 1.5 TB drive handy, you could use WinMFS to copy to it and specify a larger swap partition, perhaps.

I cannot get the drives to mount probably due to old instructions. When I try to mount /dev/hda4 /mnt it tells me the partion doesnt exist. I already have a 2TB drive on the way, so if I cannot figure anything out by the time it arrives, I will just image it with the drive and increase the swap partition to 500MB. I have already put the original drive back in my Tivo so it will get software updates. That way if the image from the 1TB to the 2TB fails I can just image the 2TB with the original drive.

I cannot get the drives to mount probably due to old instructions. When I try to mount /dev/hda4 /mnt it tells me the partion doesnt exist. I already have a 2TB drive on the way, so if I cannot figure anything out by the time it arrives, I will just image it with the drive and increase the swap partition to 500MB. I have already put the original drive back in my Tivo so it will get software updates. That way if the image from the 1TB to the 2TB fails I can just image the 2TB with the original drive.

pdisk -l when booted in the MFSLive CD and the Tivo Drive the only drive connected to my pc on SATA1 port. shows 4 listings the last one listed as Tivo or Tivo Drive. I cannot remember the exact listings.

My 2TB drive will arrive today so after work I can update if imaging to the 2TB and setting a customer swap of 500Mb works.

pdisk -l when booted in the MFSLive CD and the Tivo Drive the only drive connected to my pc on SATA1 port. shows 4 listings the last one listed as Tivo or Tivo Drive. I cannot remember the exact listings.

My 2TB drive will arrive today so after work I can update if imaging to the 2TB and setting a customer swap of 500Mb works.

Have you got other drives connected by USB or something?

There's never been a TiVo drive with fewer than 11 partitions and most have 13 if they're stock, and pdisk should list them all.

I could see pdisk listing four different drives, and only recognizing one as a TiVo drive, since it doesn't read IBM/DOS style MBRs any better than fdisk reads Apple Partition Maps.

Just to be clear

pdisk -l

or

fdisk -l

is the command, followed by a space, followed by a hyphen, followed by a lowercase "L" (and not a numeral 1), which I assume stands for "list".

When I do an MSinfo on the drive it says it is not a tivo drive. I tried the fix swap and boot but MSinfo still says it isn't a tivo drive. Even though when I select the drive it says it is a Tivo Series 2 or 3 drive

WinMFS will not copy or fix a drive that is stuck in a GSOD (green screen of death) boot loop.

I just went through this last month and I was able to recover my shows eventually.

The reason WinMFS won't touch your drive once it is in a GSOD boot loop is because the "Magic" identifier in the SuperHeader for the drive is no longer set to "ebbafeed". WinMFS only recognizes "Magic" identifiers for "ebbafeed" and "abbafeed" and GSOD boot loop drives are usually set to some other number like "37353033"

The most likely reason for your GSOD loop is actually hard drive issues. The swap size issue, IMO is a vestige of very old TiVo S1/S2 days. The S3 units only have 128MB swap out of the factory even with larger drives, so presumably TiVo knows what they are doing and can complete a KS 57 for your 1TB drive even with 128MB swap.

Unless you run the extensive hard drive test options that take several hours, you may not catch the hard drive errors.

Anyway, my suggestion based on what I did to recover my shows and season passes is to:

dd_rescue -A -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
this will copy your old drive to the new drive, filling in the errors with zeros

put new drive back in TiVo and let it finish KS 57

BE VERY CAREFUL to get the source / destination drives correct.

It is easy to mess things up and overwrite your source drive.

This assumes your source drive is sda and destination (new) drive is sdb, adjust appropriately for your setup. Also the new drive needs to be as big or larger than the old drive.

As a sanity check, please make sure your source drive has 13+ partitions in pdisk before you start. I didn't quite understand why you were saying your drive has 4 partitions above.

KS 57 could take a long time to finish. It isn't an issue unless you are actually getting the KS 57 boot loop, where it goes back to welcome powering up and then Green Screen and repeats this over and over.

should both show all hard drives connected to the motherboard whether they can read the boot partitions or not.

I have seen times when that particular version of fdisk, if there was an IDE optical drive attached, would get "caught" on the optical drive, which was /dev/hd"something" and never make it on to the /dev/sd'whatevers", but if you specified which SATA drive you wanted it to look at, it would find it if it were there and there wasn't anything wrong.

depending on whether you have a TCD652160 that was upgraded to a 1TB drive or a TCD658000 that came with that 1TB drive with which you're having trouble and use WinMFS to restore it to some drive other than the one that was in the TiVo when this all started (although if you have an original 160GB 652 drive, don't use it, either)

When it finishes and offers to expand, don't bother, this is just a test.

(and it'll probably not expand but say it did and possibly screw up the drive anyway because the expansion wasn't done as an entirely separate step, for reasons I don't understand, but they exist just the same)

I must have done something wrong the first time I did the pdisk -l I tried it again and I am seeing a long list of partitions.

sfhub, I tried your suggestion but it didn't work. I must have a corruption in the software that the kickstart 57 cannot correct.

unitron - your suggestion, are those just images to reimage a drive? My Tivo HD does boot fine from the original drive.

I tried going through the steps again in the link I provided but using sda instead of hda. to swap the spare software partition with the swap partition but I am still stuck in an GSOD loop. Unless anyone has any more ideas I think my programs are lost and I will just image my new 2TB drive with the original Tivo Drive.